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shokwave comments on Defecting by Accident - A Flaw Common to Analytical People - Less Wrong
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You just assumed your conclusion: that polite words are not part of the signal.
Opposite plausible assumption: If the communication is deprecated or even ignored because of the absence of polite words, then the polite words are important to the communication and should be considered part of it.
As I said, to make assertions like this one needs actual numbers. If you don't have any, that's fine, I don't either ;-) But I can recognise that we've reached the stage of opposed but plausible statements, which means we have something falsifiable, and maybe should have a go at doing so. If no-one has already.
Exercise for the reader: Which words in this comment are noise?
Which words in that comment are noise?
and
That is, at least, my view on noise. Sure, it's no major problem; I parsed your comment just as easily, it took barely any extra effort on my part, it didn't obscure anything - it wasn't actively bad at all. But it wasn't good either, it was just grease. I don't see a need to counsel people towards more grease on LessWrong specifically. In almost all cases, yes, smart people need a lot more grease than they use. But part of the LessWrong aesthetic is a sort of soft Crocker's rules.
What I am mostly concerned about: about halfway down the comment, when AlanCrowe talks about the budget meeting example: that 'upgrading' of an idea is not desirable on LessWrong. To illustrate the point, if we upgraded Ben Goertzel's ideas on AGI from 'flawed' to 'great idea, have you thought about friendliness?', we would be making an error.
The answer is, of course: none of it was "grease." It was superfluous to you, but would not have been superfluous to others. A public comment intended to be read by many people on a blog expressly aimed at effectiveness in all regards, including communication, requires comments to be constructed robustly and with an eye to alleviating misinterpretation. Failure to do so is failure.
If you don't agree, then do please consider there are other people than you reading it and that you may be incorrect.
Exercise: Was this sufficiently unvarnished or could it have been unvarnished further? Would the unvarnishing have contributed an element to the communication that advanced the quality of LessWrong or put it back?